Routing Protocols Guide
This guide is written for people who already know a reasonable amount about IP networking and want to get a deeper understanding of the finer details of routing protocols.
Routing, in essence, is the act of finding a path from one place to another on which a packet can travel. Individual hosts in a network have addresses assigned to them, and other hosts send off packets destined to those addresses, trusting that the network will deliver the packets to the intended recipient.
The path-learning processes that enable data networks to operate in this dynamic manner are routing protocols.
Routing protocols enable data networks to be self-organizing systems. Routers are aware of the blocks of addresses that are directly connected to them and, with the aid of routing protocols, advertise this knowledge to other routers. The recipients of these advertisements relay the information to yet other routers, and so on, until the knowledge of which address blocks are located where is spread through the whole network.
The material covered in this 426-page guide looks exclusively at IP routing protocols and is divided into three main sections:
- IPv4 unicast routing protocols: RIP, OSPF, BGP and Route Filtering
- IPv6 unicast routing protocols: Intro to IPv6, RIPng, OSPFv3 and BGP4+
- Multicast routing protocols: Layer 2/Layer 3 Multicasting, MLD, PIM-DM, PIM-SM, PIM-SSM, and PIMv6
Understanding the finer details of IP routing protocols enables network engineers to create routing schemes that are:
- Well suited to the performance capabilities of their network equipment
- Capable of supporting multiple paths offering different types of service
- Easy to understand, troubleshoot and maintain
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